I Found My First Gray Hair Today. Really. I Did.

I awoke early to get a fancy, free haircut. I’ve done this before—it entails signing up months in advance and arriving early and sitting for two hours through a class in a white bright room where a bevy of hairdressers all examine your hair and touch it. I was told last time I did this, in front of all the students, that I had a “high occipital bone.” News to me.

The haircut, it turns out, is next Tuesday.

Ah, that leaves me with 4.5 hours till I have to be at work, today, I thought, very loudly, to myself.

First, I wander to the Hudson River. I observe the bike riders, the construction dudes, the smell of the slaughterhouses that are left in the Meatpacking District and the bars that have grown up around the bloody stank with names like “The Hog Pit.”

I call my sister. I head east to her place of work, which turns out to be MoMA, which turns out to be closed for the day. I turn out to see the Munch exhibit, and I turn out to cringe at the painful beauty of his woodcuts, lithographs and paintings, and at the names of them, like “Angst,” and “Angst II.” I find myself honestly shocked at all the bones and fetuses and misery he interpreted.

My sister and I discuss the Scandinavians and their pain.

“It’s really real,” she insists.

“Is it the dark winters?” I wonder aloud.

We discuss the merits of her boyfriend being from Denmark.

We discuss her projected inability to ever be able to speak Danish.

“Oh,” I say. “Of course you can. I thought I couldn’t learn a non-romance language, but hey, I picked up some Hebrew when I tried.”

“Yeah,” she says, “but no. I can’t pronounce a single word correctly.”

In my mind, I’m thinking, yeah, that’s my sister, the Grand Cynic of New York.

“Oh yeah?” I say. “I’m sure you’d get used to it.”

“Okay,” she says. “Take, for instance, the word ‘K-Y-D.’ How would you pronounce that?”

“Hmm,” I say, considering what the sneaky Danish trick might be to this arrangement of letters. I like a language challenge. I can do this, I think. I’ve studied four and am a writer by birth. I say, with total awareness that I have failed this test, “I guess I can only think it would be “kid” or “kyde.”

“Ah,” she says with contempt and awe. “It is pronounced ‘KYULE.’”

Kyule. Kyule…Kyule. I feel my mind being eaten alive.

We take cover in the industrial design exhibit, where I fall deeply into reverie over a Le Corbusier chair and a teacup that is low and thin that makes me wish I lived in 1935 and had a fine taste in objects. I round out the day in the Museum of American Folk Art, appreciating the wood fish lures that are shaped and painted like real fish. Like, say, trout.